A good story, until the over the top action gets in the way

Rating: 5/10 (7 August 2016)

THE ISLAND is one of those films that starts off promising with an intriguing first hour before descending into the kind of banality that only Michael Bay knows how to make – see TRANSFORMERS for another good example. For the first hour or so we're put into an institutionalised world of clones and cloning and the suspense moves along quite a bit. Although the movie is obviously heavily derived from others that have come before it – LOGAN'S RUN, MINORITY REPORT, most noticeably THE CLONUS HORROR (the makers of whom were compensated due to the 'similarities'), it moves along nicely with some nice supporting acting to drive us along. All right, so Bay's camera-work can be a bit distracting (vertigo-inducing at times) but I was really enjoying it.
Then the two heroes of the film escape the compound and the buck stops there. It's as if that was the end of the script and the guys on set were just making it up as they went along. Sure, there are a few twists (including the inevitable clone-meeting-the-cloned scene) and an ending that confirms EXACTLY to Hollywood standards, but for the rest this is just a big, long bloated action scene that lasts almost an hour and a half after the story ends. Now I love action movies – and sometimes I love films where they're just action without story (usually martial arts films like WARRIOR KING). But the action here is overblown, over-bloated, and soulless, action where they're throwing millions of dollars a minute at the screen but can get hardly anything right. Cars explode, people are shot and blown up, buildings are trashed and people jump off skyscrapers and survive. None of it is remotely realistic but I did enjoy – hugely, come to that – one bit, which is the freeway chase, when the good guys on a truck are off-loading train wheels at their pursuers. Okay, so it's an obvious reprise of the freeway chase in BAD BOYS II, but in terms of sheer spectacle and carnage it takes some beating.
So much time is spent on the action that the ending is really rushed and full of plot holes. Once again we have an enemy base with a built-in 'self destruct' button (or rather, a lever here) that blows the whole thing – why do they make such expensive places so simple to destroy? There are other crazy moments – characters switching allegiance just like that, one character getting captured and not even searched so they can produce a weapon later – but by this stage you end up not caring. The fault definitely lies with Bay and the scriptwriter, because the actors do a decent job. McGregor and Johansson are young, pretty, fairly charismatic leads, and the likes of Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Buscemi, and Ethan Phillips put in great minor performances. Sean Bean's on hand as the typecast British bad guy but he's still good value for money. The only one who sticks out like a sore thumb is Djimon Hounsou, so good in BLOOD DIAMOND, so wooden here. You wouldn't believe it's the same guy, but then again he gets about three lines of dialogue and the camera just dwells on him looking 'cool' for the rest of it. In the end, THE ISLAND is really a film of two halves – a good first half and a pretty bad second. It evens off as a distinctly average movie, one you can watch but not bother seeing again.